There are so many ways this could have gone wrong...
For example, the guy was passed out - the initial impact could have knocked the other driver's foot off the gas, or cause it to press harder, further worsening the situation.
Also, if the bumpers didn't match, or if the angle of impact was not totally flat, you could easily end up in a "jackknife" style situation where the rear car pushes the front car at an angle causing it to loose traction and knocking both off course.
Not to write off his quick thinking, but I would be hesitant to try repeating this.
Yes, indeed. Next time you should be very hesitant. Hesitate so much that the out of control car plows into a busy intersection. So many things could go right. It could just barely miss that SUV with 4 kids in the back, and I'm sure it would only scare the elderly couple crossing the street.
C'mon, seriously? The article is an up-beat account of how things can go right. How under pressure someone made a necessarily quick decision to take action rather than sit on the sidelines and watch as an observer. Do you really think anyone sane-minded individual is going to come away from this article thinking to themselves, "Man, next time I'm on the highway I need to give this a shot"?
That's only really a problem if all that energy is transferred to another object (near) instantaneously - for instance if the vehicle hits a stationary object like a car waiting at an intersection.
Colliding at a relative speed of only a few miles per hour and then hitting the brakes allowed Innes to dissipate that energy in a more controlled way. Risky, certainly, but I don't think it's as risky as you think it is.
edit: as an analogy, think about landing a spaceship on a meteorite - it may be moving fast enough to wipe out civilisation as we know it if it hit Earth, but you could still safely stand on its surface. Relative velocity is key.
You wouldn't have to use a spaceship. "meteorite" means it's already hit the ground. You could just walk over to it, assuming it didn't wipe out all life.
Not to rub it in, but this is one of those cases where a bit of intuition will get you a lot further than a calculation. Is it plausible that a 2 ton vehicle travelling at 40 mph is equivalent to 70 kg of TNT?
Think about the damage done by a crashing minivan. Enough to bend some metal, maybe even knock down a small brick wall. But a 70 kg TNT bomb would easily blow the car into many pieces.
Alternatively, how much fuel does it take to accelerate your van from a standstill to 40 mph? A tiny fraction of a litre, which is why you could do it hundreds of times on a tank of gas. Is that tiny fraction of a litre of gasoline going to be energetically equivalent to 70 kg of TNT?
> Is it plausible that a 2 ton vehicle travelling at 40 mph is equivalent to 70 kg of TNT?
I helps to know that TNT has roughly one tenth the energy density of petrol (4 MJ/kg v. 40 MJ/kg). If it took 7 kg of fuel just to accelerate a vehicle to 40 mph, vehicles would have to carry vastly more fuel than they do.
I pray I never fear to make the decision to save someone's life, all risks reasonably considered.
I have been in a similar situation, and I can tell you: your mettle is tested. You have a tiny amount of time to make a decision, so little that it almost comes down to your instincts. You have enough time to make an assessment of what kind of fallout is about to occur for all parties involved, and your main concern is, hopefully, to minimize the damage.
Sure, you may not have all the information at hand to make a perfect decision, and few of us can say to have any reliable precognitive power. You have what you always have in life: some information and the ability to make a choice.
Let not fear stay your hand. Fear kills as easily as a heart condition. It can always go horribly wrong, but when something appears by sound reasoning to be inevitable, will you have the courage to intervene?
In the OP the guy used the information he had to make a fast decision. The toughest thing in the situation I encountered was the moment I realized his heart had stopped and needed to decide right then to take action.
1. Drive infront
2. Match the speed
3. Slowly reduce speed so that the car behind knocks
into your back bumper at a relative speed of like
1 mph. Maybe you feel a tiny bump.
4. Apply brakes
Yes it's impressive, but I'd be willing to bet it's not that dangerous at all. The very very worst case scenario is that you don't match the speed very well and get rear ended, which is pretty much the best type of crash you can have.
- breaks are not even across the wheels, he spins and goes right back into the traffic, guy behind falls over after driving the other way into the barrier
- collision affects one of the front wheels of the car behind, that car turns into the traffic - minivan either separates or gets locked due to collision
- engine in minivan stalls after collision, break assist stop working, simply pressing the pedal is not enough to stop both cars
- due to the shape of cars' front and back, the car in the front gets hit and one of the wheels get locked, suddenly breaks; the car in the back has enough kinetic energy to hit and injure passengers sitting in the back
- ... I could go forever
As in other posts above - I don't want to say it was stupid / bad that he tried... It worked, everyone's fine, it's great. But for me, my family in the car is infinitely more important than potential damage that might be caused by an unknown person in an car that's under no control.
"But for me, my family in the car is infinitely more important than potential damage that might be caused by an unknown person in an car that's under no control."
I'm glad someone remembered this. Saving someone else might be a good thing, but saving your own family is definitely heroic.
It's not the same having a car hit you at 1 mph when you're stationary than when you're both doing 40 mph and the guy behind is unconscious. A number of things can go wrong.
The moment you have other people in your vehicle you're _responsible_ for their lives. Now everyone is cheering because it worked out but it could have easily ended up as a [Retard] tag on Fark.
If he matched the truck's speed before pulling in front of him, would it reduce the risk of the jackknife situation you described? Seems like it would to me.
Actually there was one other outcome possible if the cars made contact at a wrong angle (which was not that probable since the pickup was against a barrier and the engineers car was driving straight in the lane): The pickup would have pushed against the barrier some more that it would have probably stopped the car or at least reduce the speed at which it was traveling, while at the same time pushing the car in front to the opposite side, maybe making spin in place. If things went wrong in this situation at worse he'd have a car in a worse state and the man in the pickup could have died if the barrier made him topple over. The probability of the pick-up going into traffic again (which would make the car in front collide with the barrier, which could be fatal) was really small... hell uuid duplicate probability small at that.
There is nothing wrong with this comment. The objections he raises are perfectly valid. Yes, it could have gone dreadfully wrong. In this instance, it didn't, and it is a credit to the engineer's skill that it worked. For many other people however, it would definitely be a bad idea to try.
Yes, it's great that he did it, and that he took fast action to save a life. It really is; it's a great story! But a down-to-earth comment is not worth downmodding over; it is neither wrong nor irrelevant.
Imagine what the insurance would have had to pay out if Pace had not been stopped, T-boned a car in an intersection (mentioned in the article) and killed one or more people. The insurance company would be paying out a bit more then a smashed window and bent bumpers. Insurance if anyone understands risk mitigation.
But I agree, they could have been assholes about it, but instead took the honorable route.
I am sure that they thought that it would be a great PR moment. Not that it should detract from their actions. Now I can place all of their ads and commercials in the context of their response to this incident.
That retired guy who got saved sure is a great volunteer - folks like him are the foundation of a great community.
He manages harvesting and marketing for the Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm, which is run by the city of Bellevue, and he fills the rest of his schedule volunteering for Special Olympics events, teaching for the Kiwanis Educated Youth Club and organizing donation drives from local grocery stores.
This is an incredible story. But I think it's important for everyone to remember the context of who this hero is.
He manages the F22 fighter jet program at Boeing. That means that he's in charge of building gigantic killing machines that are only built so that they can be used to kill or threaten to kill human beings.
This man did an incredible thing on the road and I'm not trying to diminish that. But he's not a 100% good person: he works with weapons fully knowing that his work has probably resulted in many deaths of innocent people.
Edit: Hey downvoters, I'm being totally serious here. Please reply to me and we can have a discussion; downvoting my opinions silently (because you disagree? or you think I'm trolling? or you don't like what I'm saying?) is rude and not good for the community.
I believe you're not trolling, so here's an attempt to explain. First, even if you're right, it's discordant to spoil a beautiful story of individual goodness. Second, even if you're right about Boeing, the connection you're drawing to this one guy is facile. If he's evil for working at Boeing, by that standard we're all so drenched in evil the difference is negligible. Your reference to being a "100% good person" is foolish; anyone who would even entertain the concept of such a thing being possible in this world has a lot of limbering up to do. Finally, your favored ideology is not one of the, let's say, two or three ideologies most in favor here. In general, when speaking in a community with very different basic beliefs, you need to make fewer assumptions - probably a good idea in any case.
The engineers don't decide to go to war. The military gives them a spec for a weapon system, and they build it. Outside of the Manhattan project, I can think of very few instances where the actual engineers involved are in any way irreplacable. So if you don't do it, someone else will anyway. Once the government decides it wants to buy a weapon system, it is going to get it if it is technically and financially feasible.
So don't point your finger at this guy, if you have a problem with fighter jets then you need to change the country itself. That is through politics and the military. To me he is just an aerospace engineer that works on the F-22, I see no problem with that.
Especially considering the F-22 is barely used and is mostly a weapon to deal with other jets that don't even exist yet. If you are working on biological, nuclear, or chemical weaopns than I'd have problems with it, but something like a missile or a rifle or a tank isn't that ethically bad because we already have plenty of weapons just like them. The advances in technology just allows the military to do things more precisely. If you have a choice between a guided missile to hit a house, or an artillery barrage to level a block, which would you rather have? Engineers enabled the former.
So you neglect that lives that might be saved by building the F22, because they might also be used to kill people. I can kill someone with my car, so by definition Lexus is an evil company and you'd be wrong to work with them? A gun might save your life someday... I'm pretty sure my neighbor agrees with me on that one with the bunch of thieves he has brought to justice (not killed).
The F-22 is primarily designed to shoot down enemy aircraft. It has never been used in combat, and hence has never been used to kill anyone, guilty or innocent. If it were to be used, it would primarily be used to shoot down military aircraft--in other words, to destroy other "gigantic killing machines". (It has some ground attack capability, mainly to satisfy color-of-the-bikeshed criticisms from Congressmen, but that's not it's raison d'etre.)
1) it's off topic. It's like if there was a thread about a Marine saving a kid's life at a pool using such-and-such technique and you went off about how Marines are trained to kill and therefore the guy sucks.
2) Even if the thread was about F22 as a weapon, your comment displays remarkable ignorance of what the platform is used for. It's an air superiority fighter; you use it to shoot other fighter aircraft, whose occupants are typically military personnel actively engaged in warfare, not "innocents". And as far as I can tell, it's never been involved in actual combat. So your claim that his work "probably resulted in many deaths of innocent people" is completely off base.
3) I have friends who have worked on this and similar platforms, who are also good people. They all know that their systems are designed to kill, have thought through the ethical and philosophical ramifications of that (as well as the ramifications of deterrence, of Russia or China winning a global war, etc.), and have decided that what they're doing is a good thing. You may not agree with them, but at least have the decency to address them on an adult level instead of with naive platitudes like they're not good because they work on weapons. That's not the sort of statement I expect from someone looking to have a reasoned discussion. (In comparison, my Mennonite friends and military friends have had some very good, mature, respectful conversations about this topic, without making personal attacks like "you're not a good person".)
In summary: your post was off topic, factually incorrect, and moderately trollish. I'd say that is rude and not good for the community.
In spite of the sarcasm, it's actually a good argument.
Warfare before the advent of nuclear weapons was a devastatingly bloody affair, with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. And warfare these days in which only one side or neither has nuclear weapons is much the same.
But when two nuclear powers fight? There are skirmishes. Proxy wars. Posturing and arms races and diplomacy and . . . very little bloodshed. For all its terror and danger and struggle, the Cold War did not wipe out an entire generation of young men the way previous World Wars had. As violent and bloody a past as India and Pakistan have had, once they both went nuclear, they settled down. They still fight, but it's limited. Neither side wants it to escalate out of control.
That is the nature of strategic weapons. Nobody wants to pick a fight with a country that has ICBMs or B-52s. Heck, countries that have them don't want to pick fights with each other. What could they hope to win that would offset the staggering losses they could incur?
As they say, an armed society is a polite society. It scales right up to nations.
Raptor is such a weapon. Not because of the casualties it could inflict -- it can carry only a paltry eight missiles, or a couple medium bombs -- but because of what it does to an air force.
The Air Force periodically goes out for large force exercises -- where they get a huge number of jets together in the air, and act out something as close to a real war as they can. The last few years Raptor's been going to those, and its numbers are astonishing. They match up Red with tons of 4 or 4.5 gen fighters against Blue with a few 4 gen fighters and a few Raptors. And Blue wins. With a kill ratio like 180-0 or 241-2. [1]
Nobody wants to pick a fight with that.
There are two ways to get a country to resolve its conflicts with you peacefully. One is to trust in their good nature and dislike for bloodshed. The other is to make fighting not an option. The second route is more reliable in my opinion, and strategic weapons accomplish it.
If you hate war, you should love Raptor. Just sitting on the tarmac, it saves lives. American lives, yeah, but Chinese or North Korean or Russian lives too. It prevents war and forces people to pursue peace.
Some people make aluminum rivets. These can be used to make weapons. Now that they know, should they show up for work on Monday if they are "good people"? How about bauxite miners who mine the minerals that are used to make aluminum to make rivets?
Several comments mention the upcoming intersection as if crossing traffic were likely. It is actually a classic cloverleaf. Search google maps for Renton Washington and look for highway 167, where the incident occurred, and its intersection with I-405. I haven't been over there for several months, so I'm not sure how up-to-date the satellite view is, but it looks right to me.
Grady Way is just a few hundred feet north of I-405, and it's a fairly busy (traditional) intersection.
Also, the concrete median the truck had bounced off of ends just before Grady Way. It's likely the guy would've either crossed traffic at Grady Way or moved into oncoming traffic. Either way, there's a high likelihood of serious injury or fatality stemming from an out-of-control vehicle moving through that intersection.
Yes. Impossible? No. The force that your car is capable of exerting on your tires is far less than the engine is capable of producing. You can see this in performance stats, where 100 to 0 braking always takes much less time than 0 to 100 acceleration. We don't generally quote braking power for cars, but given the increasing attention to safety it is much higher now than it has been historically.
Of course, this would not work well if the other vehicle was substantially heavier (best indicated by the number and size of tires). You would have a difficult time stopping a tractor trailer with a minivan, possibly causing your brakes to fail or your tires to melt.
Since the car was in gear I wouldn't be surprised if a slow and controlled breaking would cause the engine to stall.
He passed out because his circulation was poor, which I take to mean that his foot was resting on the accelerator, not that he was pushing it to floor.
Have you ever driven a car with a manual transmission and tried to set off with the handbrake pulled? Brakes can bring a car to standstill even fighting the engine.
The brakes in the SUV in front are dimensioned for that SUV and I assume those brakes are not worse than the ones in the truck behind it.
the handbrake is a lot less effective than the main brakes. Especialy on cars with all round disks. The handbrake only puts a small brake on the rear axle.
Consider that most the acceleration you can possibly exert is the friction between your tires and the road. Consider that your brakes are almost always powerful enough to hit that max (and more -- you can induce a skid). Consider that your engine sometimes is powerful enough to hit that max, but it usually isn't, especially at high speed.
Consider some advice from my driver's ed teacher long ago: "Some folks may have 4 wheel drive, but everybody has 4 wheel stop."
So we have two vehicles duking it out high speed (where braking power >> acceleration power already). It's probably no contest. But at worst, it's a high mass minivan with 4 wheels saying "stop" in a friction-with-the-pavement contest with a medium mass pickup with (probably) 2 wheels saying "go".
The minivan should win handily. Even if the pickup has it floored the whole time.
I think what may have helped was the fact that at 40mph, the vehicle was likely in 3rd gear or so. After initially slowing it down, the higher gear would mean that the engine would produce less torque and make it easier to slow down.
The exact same thing happened about three years ago in the middle of the Golden Gate bridge (talk about dramatic!) and apparently the motorist safely guided the unconscious driver's car across two lanes of traffic to the divider.
An Engineer who can act on his Gut Feel - when the "gut feel" is really his knowledge and experience coming together, needs to be celebrated. Too often we ignore the people who make meaningful but localized differences, so I am all for this story to hit the national headlines.
Not wanting to discredit Innes' quick thinking. Though this kind of incident does show the danger of policy favouring roads and more driving over mass transit/public transportation. The greater the number of cars on the road, the greater the odds that someone will have a lapse of concentration, consciousness or make some kind of error. It was lucky that someone was able to intervene in this instance, but in other instances there's nothing much anyone could do. Short of designing cars that stop when the driver is unconscious (trains have had technology to ensure the driver is conscious for some decades now).
Not really a problem in this part of the world. Though I do like to stand a safe distance from the edge as a train rolls in. There have been a few incidents where mothers with prams forgot to put brakes on the pram has rolled onto the track as train came on. Though both instances I recall had a lucky ending. It doesn't help that the platforms which were build in the days when railways were fully staffed are built slopping towards the track for drainage.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadKids if somebody offers you Newtonian mechanics - just say no!
For example, the guy was passed out - the initial impact could have knocked the other driver's foot off the gas, or cause it to press harder, further worsening the situation.
Also, if the bumpers didn't match, or if the angle of impact was not totally flat, you could easily end up in a "jackknife" style situation where the rear car pushes the front car at an angle causing it to loose traction and knocking both off course.
Not to write off his quick thinking, but I would be hesitant to try repeating this.
C'mon, seriously? The article is an up-beat account of how things can go right. How under pressure someone made a necessarily quick decision to take action rather than sit on the sidelines and watch as an observer. Do you really think anyone sane-minded individual is going to come away from this article thinking to themselves, "Man, next time I'm on the highway I need to give this a shot"?
That's the kind of fire this guy was playing with, for his life, the life of his family, the life of the other driver and all the bystanders.
Not to understate his heroism, but had this gone horribly wrong he'd probably be a Darwin award candidate.
Colliding at a relative speed of only a few miles per hour and then hitting the brakes allowed Innes to dissipate that energy in a more controlled way. Risky, certainly, but I don't think it's as risky as you think it is.
edit: as an analogy, think about landing a spaceship on a meteorite - it may be moving fast enough to wipe out civilisation as we know it if it hit Earth, but you could still safely stand on its surface. Relative velocity is key.
You're off by a factor of 1000. It's 62.9 grams of TNT: http://www.google.com/search?q=%280.5+*+%2840+mph%29%5E2+*+2...
Thanks for the correction!
Think about the damage done by a crashing minivan. Enough to bend some metal, maybe even knock down a small brick wall. But a 70 kg TNT bomb would easily blow the car into many pieces.
Alternatively, how much fuel does it take to accelerate your van from a standstill to 40 mph? A tiny fraction of a litre, which is why you could do it hundreds of times on a tank of gas. Is that tiny fraction of a litre of gasoline going to be energetically equivalent to 70 kg of TNT?
I helps to know that TNT has roughly one tenth the energy density of petrol (4 MJ/kg v. 40 MJ/kg). If it took 7 kg of fuel just to accelerate a vehicle to 40 mph, vehicles would have to carry vastly more fuel than they do.
I have been in a similar situation, and I can tell you: your mettle is tested. You have a tiny amount of time to make a decision, so little that it almost comes down to your instincts. You have enough time to make an assessment of what kind of fallout is about to occur for all parties involved, and your main concern is, hopefully, to minimize the damage.
Sure, you may not have all the information at hand to make a perfect decision, and few of us can say to have any reliable precognitive power. You have what you always have in life: some information and the ability to make a choice.
Let not fear stay your hand. Fear kills as easily as a heart condition. It can always go horribly wrong, but when something appears by sound reasoning to be inevitable, will you have the courage to intervene?
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/you-never-think-youll-have-to-do...
In the OP the guy used the information he had to make a fast decision. The toughest thing in the situation I encountered was the moment I realized his heart had stopped and needed to decide right then to take action.
It's not heroic if the stakes aren't high.
more like "Innes kicked into irresponsible mode risking other people's lives to try something he probably saw on a movie"
- breaks are not even across the wheels, he spins and goes right back into the traffic, guy behind falls over after driving the other way into the barrier
- collision affects one of the front wheels of the car behind, that car turns into the traffic - minivan either separates or gets locked due to collision
- engine in minivan stalls after collision, break assist stop working, simply pressing the pedal is not enough to stop both cars
- due to the shape of cars' front and back, the car in the front gets hit and one of the wheels get locked, suddenly breaks; the car in the back has enough kinetic energy to hit and injure passengers sitting in the back
- ... I could go forever
As in other posts above - I don't want to say it was stupid / bad that he tried... It worked, everyone's fine, it's great. But for me, my family in the car is infinitely more important than potential damage that might be caused by an unknown person in an car that's under no control.
If it looks like it's not going to work, you just speed up again...
I'm glad someone remembered this. Saving someone else might be a good thing, but saving your own family is definitely heroic.
Don't laugh: I learned how to shift w/o a working clutch from an article in Motor Trend and it came in handy one day.
The moment you have other people in your vehicle you're _responsible_ for their lives. Now everyone is cheering because it worked out but it could have easily ended up as a [Retard] tag on Fark.
Yes, it's great that he did it, and that he took fast action to save a life. It really is; it's a great story! But a down-to-earth comment is not worth downmodding over; it is neither wrong nor irrelevant.
The insurance company could have said "hey you chose to be rear ended". Instead they paid up without quibbling and called him a hero in the process.
But I agree, they could have been assholes about it, but instead took the honorable route.
He manages harvesting and marketing for the Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm, which is run by the city of Bellevue, and he fills the rest of his schedule volunteering for Special Olympics events, teaching for the Kiwanis Educated Youth Club and organizing donation drives from local grocery stores.
He manages the F22 fighter jet program at Boeing. That means that he's in charge of building gigantic killing machines that are only built so that they can be used to kill or threaten to kill human beings.
This man did an incredible thing on the road and I'm not trying to diminish that. But he's not a 100% good person: he works with weapons fully knowing that his work has probably resulted in many deaths of innocent people.
Edit: Hey downvoters, I'm being totally serious here. Please reply to me and we can have a discussion; downvoting my opinions silently (because you disagree? or you think I'm trolling? or you don't like what I'm saying?) is rude and not good for the community.
Also, please (re-)read the HN guidelines.
So don't point your finger at this guy, if you have a problem with fighter jets then you need to change the country itself. That is through politics and the military. To me he is just an aerospace engineer that works on the F-22, I see no problem with that.
Especially considering the F-22 is barely used and is mostly a weapon to deal with other jets that don't even exist yet. If you are working on biological, nuclear, or chemical weaopns than I'd have problems with it, but something like a missile or a rifle or a tank isn't that ethically bad because we already have plenty of weapons just like them. The advances in technology just allows the military to do things more precisely. If you have a choice between a guided missile to hit a house, or an artillery barrage to level a block, which would you rather have? Engineers enabled the former.
1) it's off topic. It's like if there was a thread about a Marine saving a kid's life at a pool using such-and-such technique and you went off about how Marines are trained to kill and therefore the guy sucks.
2) Even if the thread was about F22 as a weapon, your comment displays remarkable ignorance of what the platform is used for. It's an air superiority fighter; you use it to shoot other fighter aircraft, whose occupants are typically military personnel actively engaged in warfare, not "innocents". And as far as I can tell, it's never been involved in actual combat. So your claim that his work "probably resulted in many deaths of innocent people" is completely off base.
3) I have friends who have worked on this and similar platforms, who are also good people. They all know that their systems are designed to kill, have thought through the ethical and philosophical ramifications of that (as well as the ramifications of deterrence, of Russia or China winning a global war, etc.), and have decided that what they're doing is a good thing. You may not agree with them, but at least have the decency to address them on an adult level instead of with naive platitudes like they're not good because they work on weapons. That's not the sort of statement I expect from someone looking to have a reasoned discussion. (In comparison, my Mennonite friends and military friends have had some very good, mature, respectful conversations about this topic, without making personal attacks like "you're not a good person".)
In summary: your post was off topic, factually incorrect, and moderately trollish. I'd say that is rude and not good for the community.
It's an interesting problem space, and with many challenges.
Yes, Boeing, Northrop Grumman & Lockheed Martin number among our customers, and our software is used in these programs.
So do NASA and various other companies putting things up into space, things orthogonal to defense.
By your logic, because our software makes it simpler and cheaper to manufacture F-22s and F-35s, I am in some small way culpable as well.
It's the use to which a tool is put.
Do you pay taxes to a country involved in warfare? Do you eat meat? Do you drive a gasoline powered vehicle? Etc etc etc.
Note the above are just examples of things some people are opposed to, not necessarily me personally (in fact I do all of those things)
Warfare before the advent of nuclear weapons was a devastatingly bloody affair, with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. And warfare these days in which only one side or neither has nuclear weapons is much the same.
But when two nuclear powers fight? There are skirmishes. Proxy wars. Posturing and arms races and diplomacy and . . . very little bloodshed. For all its terror and danger and struggle, the Cold War did not wipe out an entire generation of young men the way previous World Wars had. As violent and bloody a past as India and Pakistan have had, once they both went nuclear, they settled down. They still fight, but it's limited. Neither side wants it to escalate out of control.
That is the nature of strategic weapons. Nobody wants to pick a fight with a country that has ICBMs or B-52s. Heck, countries that have them don't want to pick fights with each other. What could they hope to win that would offset the staggering losses they could incur?
As they say, an armed society is a polite society. It scales right up to nations.
Raptor is such a weapon. Not because of the casualties it could inflict -- it can carry only a paltry eight missiles, or a couple medium bombs -- but because of what it does to an air force.
The Air Force periodically goes out for large force exercises -- where they get a huge number of jets together in the air, and act out something as close to a real war as they can. The last few years Raptor's been going to those, and its numbers are astonishing. They match up Red with tons of 4 or 4.5 gen fighters against Blue with a few 4 gen fighters and a few Raptors. And Blue wins. With a kill ratio like 180-0 or 241-2. [1]
Nobody wants to pick a fight with that.
There are two ways to get a country to resolve its conflicts with you peacefully. One is to trust in their good nature and dislike for bloodshed. The other is to make fighting not an option. The second route is more reliable in my opinion, and strategic weapons accomplish it.
If you hate war, you should love Raptor. Just sitting on the tarmac, it saves lives. American lives, yeah, but Chinese or North Korean or Russian lives too. It prevents war and forces people to pursue peace.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Service_history
Also, the concrete median the truck had bounced off of ends just before Grady Way. It's likely the guy would've either crossed traffic at Grady Way or moved into oncoming traffic. Either way, there's a high likelihood of serious injury or fatality stemming from an out-of-control vehicle moving through that intersection.
Of course, this would not work well if the other vehicle was substantially heavier (best indicated by the number and size of tires). You would have a difficult time stopping a tractor trailer with a minivan, possibly causing your brakes to fail or your tires to melt.
s/less/greater/
I guess people got the gist anyway.
He passed out because his circulation was poor, which I take to mean that his foot was resting on the accelerator, not that he was pushing it to floor.
The brakes in the SUV in front are dimensioned for that SUV and I assume those brakes are not worse than the ones in the truck behind it.
Consider some advice from my driver's ed teacher long ago: "Some folks may have 4 wheel drive, but everybody has 4 wheel stop."
So we have two vehicles duking it out high speed (where braking power >> acceleration power already). It's probably no contest. But at worst, it's a high mass minivan with 4 wheels saying "stop" in a friction-with-the-pavement contest with a medium mass pickup with (probably) 2 wheels saying "go".
The minivan should win handily. Even if the pickup has it floored the whole time.
http://goldengate.org/news/bridge/GoodSamaritan.php
(I'm a big fan of public transit, and use it every day. But I always look around me when the train is approaching, or get my back to the wall.)